Trying To Bust JavaScript Out of the Browser

eldavojohn writes "If you think JavaScript is a crime against humanity, you might want to skip this article, because Ars is reporting on efforts to take JavaScript to the next level. With the new ECMAScript 5 draft proposal, the article points out a lot of positive things that have happened in the world of JavaScript. The article does a good job of citing some of the major problems with JavaScript and how a reborn library called CommonJS (formerly ServerJS) is addressing each of those problems. No one can deny JavaScript's usefulness on the front end of the web, but if you're a developer do you support the efforts to move it beyond that?"

Comments

Javascript is actually a great language

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Dynamically typed, object-oriented, with features like lexical closures that are usually only found in advanced programming languages like Lisp, Javascript is really a great language that has gotten a bad rap.

It reminds me of the lowly tomato, a member of the poisonous nightshade family of plants, which for years was considered to be inedible. These days you can't get a salad without it. Things change when you realize how useful something actually is.

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[maraist]

With no feature-set testing capability coupled with the intent of handing off raw code to 3rd party virtual engines. With no 'reference' platform to validate code (with such simple things as which string functions are supported) and no useful error messages when making language library mistakes (nor any type-safety to determine it out of the box). And with respect to dynamicity, no equivalent 'perl -c foo.pl', 'use strict', or '-warn' pragma. No package namespaces. No legitimate mechanism of loading 3'rd party library files, much less a way of namespace collision resolution/isolation. No defined order of execution (some run in-line, others run on browser completely loaded, etc).

I'd instead say that Javascript is a frustrating language that's gotten too much rep. The fact that people migrate towards 3'rd party libraries to standardize simple programming operations (like jQuery / GWT) is a testament to how bad it's legacy has gotten - when trying to do 'real' work.

Sure a command-line javascript can define it's own standard and I'm confident that it can solve all these problems.. That's the great thing about standards - everybody's got one.

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[mcrbids]

Javascript makes many hard things simple, and many simple things hard.

Need to find out what the user typed in box foo? While most client libraries require fairly detailed memory schemes in order to keep track of which box is which, Javascript reduces all that to getElementById(); - a win in any programmer's book!

But in the reverse, what about trimming that input? The offense to the mind that you have to use a USER DEFINED FUNCTION for trimming just boggles the mind. Sure, there are libraries for this, blah blah but still, the truth remains that there is no trim() function. The lack of any kind of meaningful class structure makes the special word "this" almost worthless because you can't be sure consistently what it's referring to. (yes, it is possible to figure it out, but why should you have to?) If you delete an array key directly with the delete command, eg: `delete myArray[4];` the length property doesn't get updated even though the number of elements in the array does. (WTF?!?!)

So javascript has its warts. Lots and lots of them. It is clearly a hacked-together language that is only successful because of its ubiquity, which is the same reason why it evolves so extremely slowly, which is why we still have to manually implement things like trim(), and why so many of us are doomed to deal with javascript with all of its warts.

Javascript, however, has been free of the browser for some time, due to the Mozilla's JS engine being modular. They call it spidermonkey, and I actually considered using it as a replacement for PHP on the server side in order to keep langauages consistent. Unfortunately, nobody's embedded it into Apache as a module (with any kind of stability) so this means that js scripts would have to run as separate executables, which causes all kinds of performance and security problems.

Re:Javascript is actually a great language

[sydneyfong]

- The speed issue is largely due to the crappy implementations of Javascript, which are improving due to competition among browsers. Javascript can be JIT-ed. What you probably can't do is compile it to native code and expect it to have the speed of C/C++. But then would *you* run arbitrary native binary code off the web? Sandboxing makes things slow again.

- I'll give you the lack of threading.

- 2D/3D libraries - C doesn't have one in its standard, C++ doesn't have one, in fact most don't. But you're free to implement one. It just doesn't make too much sense having a full fledged 2D/3D library in the browser, since that's where most javascript code are used in.

- experimental language, as in first appearing in 1995, used extensively for almost 15 years. Of course most people never really utilize its full power, but it's not the fault of the language

- And you use a "mission-critical application" written in Javascript running inside a web browser?

Don't ditch the language due to poor implementation and crappy users.

Getting JS out of the browser is a *great* idea.

[Karellen]

Javascript is a beautiful, elegant, small and generally well-formed language. It has a couple of warts, but what language doesn't.

However, the way that Javascript interacts with web browsers, web pages and all other things web-like is a disgusting, crufty, bloated piece of shit. The DOM bindings are horrible, as far as they go, and they're woefully incomplete. The browser deficiencies in their implementations of the DOM bindings, and the browser-specific work-arounds needed to circumvent said deficiencies, are Lovecraftian nightmares.

(The willful violation of the javascript object model for document.all in HTML5 (see bottom of page) is one particularly nasty example of what the web has done/is doing to Javascript. If you know the JS object model well, think about what that violation really entails, and what it would take to write that special case into a JS engine, for one particular property, of one particular object, if you happen to be running in a particular environment (browser))

Getting Javascript out of the browser would be the best thing that could possibly happen to Javascript.